


Bad Ending

by the_bad_idea_friend



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Codependency, F/M, Infidelity, Non-Explicit Sex, Poor Life Choices, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 06:11:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5956612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_bad_idea_friend/pseuds/the_bad_idea_friend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara really needs to reassess her life choices. She's never been particularly good at wrecking her own life, but she's found she can use the Doctor to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bad Ending

**_Addiction_ **

She’s kissing him.

She really needs to reassess her life choices. Four-for-four today on terrible decisions. She’s shown a pretty reckless disregard for her own life, a complete inability to make responsible, adult decisions, deposed a dictator by knocking him unconscious with a shoe, and done a lot of lying, much of it to her boyfriend.

Her boyfriend who is not the one she’s kissing right now.

She is presently kissing her pet alien in the throne room of a deposed dictator, and he is not stopping her, and she’s really trying to move this whole thing along, because she’s pretty sure if she can get him inside her she’ll stop thinking, and he’ll stop thinking, and everything will be okay.

Another part of her is really hoping he’ll stop her. Any moment now, he’ll flinch away, tell her what a pathetic human she is. Any second now. And she really is a pathetic human right now.

Except she’s backed him up to the throne and is straddling him. And he’s taken her shirt off, buried his face in her chest. And she’s going to shag him on a fucking throne, and this has to be the worst sexual decision she’s ever made and quickly rocketing up the list towards the worst decision she’s ever made, period.

There never should have been a last hurrah. And Danny really did have a lot to worry about, but she really does love him. Loves both of them. Loves neither of them. Hates herself more than anything right now, and how did her life get so out of control? She has calendars and lists to avoid situations like this. Okay, maybe not situations _exactly_ like this, but that is an incredibly unimportant detail right now.

She moves to reach for his belt, his fly, and he suddenly grabs her wrists and starts talking, because it is not in his nature to shut up.

“Are we--?”

“Shut up,” she replies, grinds against him, leans forward to nip at his ear, lick at the column of his neck. They’ve never done this before, and he has every right to ask questions, but fuck him. And _fuck_ him.

“You sure--?”

“Shut up,” she repeats, brings one of his hands up to cup her breast, lets him slip his fingers under her bra, and she knows she’s almost convinced him, almost shut him up from the way he’s choking out his words, the little noise in the back of his throat he’s trying to bite down.

“Danny—“

And she bites him. Not flirty foreplay, a nip, a tease. She actually, honest-to-God bites him, at the meatiest part where his neck meats his shoulder, so hard she tastes blood, _his_ blood, and Christ, that _worked_ for him, makes him shudder and moan and buck up towards her. She _really_ doesn’t want to examine that, but whatever, it shuts him up, and if he mentions Danny again, maybe ever, she will scream. He compliantly unbuckles his trousers now, she pushes aside her panties, sinks down on him, and she is not nearly wet enough for this, really, and it hurts for a long moment, but she was right, her mind’s gone quiet, everything focused around where their bodies meet. She pauses, shudders, clenches around him, then sets the pace.

They avoid eye contact. He tries to kiss her, and she pushes his head away. They’re unnaturally quiet through the whole thing, nothing but the sound of her breathing heavily, him whimpering occasionally, and the noise of static in her brain. She reaches between them, finds her clit, and rubs herself the way she likes, finds the best angle for him to move inside her, and comes hard.

Once she’s come, he grabs her hips, works to bring himself off. She can tell when he’s close and slides off of him, gives him a few tugs, lets him come into her hand, wipes it off on the side of the throne, choking back a giggle at the bewilderment the rebels might have when they find the throne room in this state, because suddenly her life has become a farce.

She doesn’t want him coming inside her. It’s not because she’s afraid of anything—she’s on prophylactics—but she just…doesn’t. She can’t explain it, but it’d just feel wrong.

She slips off his lap, finds her shirt, tugs it back on, tries and fails to not look like she’s just shagged someone, continues to avoid eye contact, so she doesn't have to acknowledge that he’s slumped on the throne with his cock still out, looking lost. Part of her is happy about this. He deserves to feel lost, the way he’s always playing around with her life like it’s one of his gadgets. Another part of her is frustrated with her own cruelty.

“We should get back to the TARDIS,” she says, tone chirpy like none of this has happened, even with his blood in her mouth, and his come in the bed of her cuticles.

“Yes,” he says, tone neutral, something dark in his eyes when she finally risks eye contact.

***

Three hours later, Clara’s fluttering around her apartment hoping it doesn’t look like she’s recently taken a shower, because why would she have taken a shower, that’s just suspicious. She’s put on a bit more perfume than normal, because she’s afraid she smells like _him_ , or like fucking stardust or something, even though she knows that is patently ridiculous, because stardust doesn’t smell like anything, and breathe Oswald, breathe.

She finally hears a knock on the door to her flat, opens the door, tries to lounge against the doorframe in a calm, relaxed, seductive manner, bumps her elbow against the frame instead, and ends up rubbing the pins and needles feeling out of it, trying to play it off.

“Hey,” Danny says, his arms full of groceries, and an open half-smile on his face. “I figured you might appreciate some company, and I thought I’d make you dinner. I know you said you felt relieved, but you guys were friends for a long time, so—“

But Clara has burst into tears, and Danny never really finishes his sentence. He puts the groceries away, dinner plans forgotten, and holds her the rest of the night as she sobs, never realizing he’s just making the whole thing worse.

**_Control_ **

She realizes she has too much power over him, this man, the Doctor. Really, any power over him should be too much, for he is both myth and monster, has blood on his hands, has destroyed entire races, probably just destroyed another one today: sentient graffiti, nasty business.

She's looking at her mobile in her hands. When Danny called, she'd fobbed him off with the 'in a meeting' auto-text, forgetting completely that it was Saturday, and now he's texted back a question mark.

 This is the sort of thing that happens when she doestn stick to the Wednesdays only rule, and, increasingly, she hasn't been. It wasn't like the Doctor didn't pop round her flat on days other than Wednesday already, lost sometimes, sometimes just desperately bored. She used to shoo him away, before. Not right now. She has plans. She is literally in the middle of dinner. Just sod off.

"Wednesdays are the most boring day of the week, Clara," he would say, "But that doesn't make the other six days any less boring."

And then one day, a not Wednesday, she starts saying yes. Alright. Let's go. Forget students or work or grading or Danny or that strange feeling in her chest that was growing and growing and would surely consume her. Let's go. Let's run.

Danny's rung again. She sets her phone on silent, slouches in the chair that the Doctor seems to love, on the catwalk, sitting sideways in it, legs thrown over one arm. Its uncomfortable. She wants uncomfortable right now.

"Home?" the Doctor asks.

"No," she says. She's short with him. He frowns.

"Where then?"

"I don't know."

His frown has turned into a proper scowl now. "I can't understand you lot. Why don't you people ever know what you want? What do you want?"

She doesn't answer. He stomps up to the catwalk, slamming his feet down louder than is strictly necessary, presumably to insure he has her attention. He's such a child sometimes. "You're in my chair."

"Come and take it," she sneers, because she can be childish too.

She has too much power over him. He's not the fierce god-like creature some people, himself included sometimes, make him out to be. He's just lonely and sad in a way that she fancies she can feel, an ache in her bones, when she's close to him, like she is right now, as he's bent over to try to pull her out of his chair, but she's pulled him into a kiss instead.

He would do anything to make sure she won't leave him again. That's a kind of love, isn't it? And if she is honest with herself, which is a bad habit she has always tried to avoid, she would increasingly do anything for him to let her stay. She can't keep the smile he made when she told him she wouldn't stop traveling with him out of her mind.

And so they kiss. Gently. She feels like she might mean it as an apology. He has been ill-used by her, on that stupid throne. She doesn't even know if this is the sort of apology he would like. It would figure she would find a way to be selfish in performing an act of selflessness.

She shifts, because the angle of the kiss is terrible, with him propping himself up on the arms of the chair, one hand held covered by one of her legs, and as she shifts his sonic screwdriver falls out of her coat pocket. She has completely forgotten she had it, forgotten she had been playing the Doctor.

The sound startles both of them from the kiss, makes them both look at it rolling along the floor. He frowns at it, vaguely disapproving of all it represents about the day. She can't help but feel cross with him about it all. She was good at his job, all the best of him and none of the worst.

When she tilts her head back towards him, he is looking at her. "Is this something we do now?" he asks.

"Why not?" she asks right back. Her voice sounds more confident than she feels, but that's nothing new.

"I can think of a thousand reasons why not," he says. He sounds strange, his voice gone weird. It's not from arousal. She can recognize that. This is something else. He's so alien sometimes, in so many different ways.

"Stop me, then," she taunts.

"Why would you think anyone would have the power to do that?"

Another kiss. Take that for a compliment, even though it isn't, and breathe in the devotion implied in those words.

He gives up trying to lean over her, she can tell his arms are cramping, and he just kneels, cups her face, keeps kissing her. She slips a little in the chair, bumps her head on the armrest, tries to swing her legs around, falls over entirely, and just pulls him down on top of her. It is the most apathetic of seductions.

She has too much power over him, and she really likes it.

**_Loss_ **

"Where's the TARDIS?" she asks. They're in a graveyard where her dead boyfriend, who she didn't love enough to be able to save, and his dead whatever who he didn't hate enough to be able to kill have just, well, died.

He makes a vague gesture towards the general area. He is sitting on a gravestone. She should probably chastise him for being disrespectful, but corpses have become mechanical abominations, and suddenly death is both meaningless and endlessly terrifying, and she can't breathe if she thinks too much about the whole thing.

She sits down next to him.

"Have you ever felt so empty inside that it feels like you're already dead, because someone who was truly alive could never feel this empty?"

"Yes," the Doctor responds, his voice impossibly soft and very tired.

"What do you do when you feel like that?"

"Run."

"Can we do that?"

"Of course we can do that. But should we?"

"When did you start trying to be the sensible one? I don't like it. Stop."

"When did you start trying to be the Doctor-y one?"

Clara thinks about saying something nasty to him, but she reckons trying to doom both of them by stranding them in the middle of a volcano is worth a lifetime of nasty retorts. She stands up instead, walks off to the direction she thinks the road is in.

"Where are you going?" the Doctor asks.

"I'm running away," Clara replies.

The Doctor follows.

Clara isn't quite sure where she is. London still, or near enough to walk into London proper, which she decides to do. Neither the Doctor nor she say anything to each other, they just walk. The streets are a mess. There's a general air of panic, and Clara can hear the sirens of emergency services in the distance.

"How long before everyone forgets?" Clara asks finally.

"A few weeks."

"Why is everyone else so stupid? I hate—I hate..." Clara trails off, isn't sure what she hates, but she hates it a lot.

"Forgetting is a gift," the Doctor says. Clara feels like hes said something like this to her before, but she, ironically, can't remember.

"You only think that because you're fucked up." She's kind of fucked up, too.

"I only think that because I’ve never been able to do it.”

Clara ignores him. They do more walking then, and after a bit Clara orients herself, figures out where they are. She could walk home from here. It would be stupid to do so, as it’s a pretty long walk and it would be much quicker to simply get on the Tube, but she can make the walk, even though it will likely take a good chunk of the day. It will serve to exhaust her. She needs that.

The Doctor takes a while to notice she is walking with purpose, but when he does, she finally asks her, “Where are we going?”

She thinks about the answer to that for far longer than she should. She could say ‘home,’ but it doesn’t feel like that. She could say ‘my place,’ but she doesn’t really know if she _has_ a place anymore.

“My flat,” she says finally.

It’s near dark by the time they’ve arrived at the block of flats. She’s cold, shivering, not really dressed to have walked this long and this late. The Doctor tried to offer her his jacket a few miles back, but she had shrugged him off. They haven’t said anything to each other in hours, which is frankly amazing. The Doctor has never been this quiet this long, has never done something as dull and repetitive as walking about London for hours without attempting to distract himself.

She must be worse off than she thinks. Or at least he must think her worse off.

Her legs ache, her body aches, but there’s a nice clarity and sharpness to everything around her.

They take the stairs, not the elevator. She fumbles in her pocket for her key, drops it, fingers cold and clumsy, and he picks it up, unlocks the door, and lets her in.

Her apartment smells like flowers, great bouquets of ‘I’m-Sorry-Your-Boyfriend-is-Dead’ flowers. She finds the nearest vase of them and chucks it against the wall. The Doctor flinches badly. The vase has exploded into a shower of water and glass shards and flower petals. Clara ignores both the Doctor and the exploded vase, doesn’t bother turning on the lights to stave off the growing darkness in her flat, walks down to the hall to her bedroom and curls up in the center of her bed in the fetal position, on top of all the covers, all of her shoes and clothes on.

The Doctor hovers in the doorway, says after a long moment, “How can I make this better?”

“Bring him back,” she says into her knees, her voice muffled.

“I can’t,” the Doctor says. “I really, truly can’t now. If I did—“

“I didn’t actually expect you to, you idiot. I’m just trying to tell you that you can’t make me feel better.”

“I can,” the Doctor disagrees. He sounds like a petulant child stubbornly confronting a problem. “I can, somehow.”

“You’re not infallible. Some things can’t be fixed with the wave of a sonic screwdriver. Haven’t you ever learned that?”

“Never,” he says. “I always leave just before someone can teach it to me.”

“You’d better leave, then,” Clara says, twisting her head so she can look at him, and the look on his face is full of such panic, such loss.

 _Good,_ she thinks. _Let him feel that. Now we can both be miserable._

It’s only after he’s left that she really remembers that misery loves company and she’s just kicked her company out.

**_Return_ **

Santa Claus vs. the Martians, and Santa Claus wins every time. For a little while there, Clara feared she might be a normal person after all, but it turns out that was just a false alarm.

They are fresh back from their new fresh start trip, which he had tried to convince her it would be fine for her to go in her nightie for, that people did it all the time, that he once knew a woman who saved a space whale while wearing her nightie, and Arthur Dent did it all while wearing a robe, so what really was the problem in the end?

She wasn’t just some woman, and she wasn’t bloody Arthur Dent, so she had changed, thank you very much, although she should probably be changing back, as she had been staying at her Gran’s and it would be best to at least pretend she’d been asleep.

She’s walking slowly around the console, letting her hand trail along the edges. _Hello_ , she thinks. _I missed you too. And I suspect you had something to do with the reason we’re back together._

The Doctor doesn’t notice her touching his TARDIS. He is looking very intensely at her, like she’s one of the fiddly bits of kit he’s always messing about with.

“What?” Clara asks, finally noticing his gaze.

“You didn’t wake up,” he says.

Clara furrows her eyebrows a little in confusion. “I did. I very clearly did. Or do you somehow think we’re still asleep?”

“You woke up eventually,” the Doctor says, waving his hand in front of him like he is physically dismissing that fact. “But everyone else woke up first.”

“Maybe I was tired,” Clara evades. “I don’t know.”

“The dream with Danny—“

“Don’t,” Clara says. She abhors it when people say his name, now, and she was never particularly keen on hearing the Doctor saying his name in the first place. At least he didn’t call Danny ‘PE.’

“You didn’t want to wake up from it,” the Doctor presses. “You didn’t want to wake up from that dream, or from any of the others. I had to wake you up.”

Clara arches an eyebrow at him, a non-verbal ‘so what?’

“Are you doing alright?” the Doctor asks finally.

Clara inhales deeply. She had spent so long answering that question. Yes, she was fine. Yes, she was coping. Yes, she could go back to work, thank you. Yes, everything was going nicely. And then, once everyone had tired of answering that question, there came the comments. Oh, you seem to be handling this so nicely. You’re bouncing back! Clara Oswald is so resilient. Clara Oswald is so strong. Clara Oswald is the inscription in a greeting card. Clara Oswald is a modern day saint, and isn’t that _nice_?

“I’m fine,” Clara says, smiling brightly. “You can ask anyone.”

“I’m not asking anyone. I’m asking you,” he replies shortly.

“And I’m saying,” she says, pulling out the tone she uses for her slowest or most stubborn pupils, “that I am fine.” She’s not a fan of his word games. She’s not really a fan of anyone’s word games that aren’t her own.

He looks at her, and she can tell what he is thinking, has always been easy for her to tell. He is thinking that she is fine in the same way that he is fine, which is to say not very fine at all. But maybe they can take their broken pieces and file them against each other until they fit.

She insinuates herself into his arms. He doesn’t stiffen, or pull away, and that’s a new development. But then, she’s done a pretty excellent job of insinuating herself into his life in the first place. He kisses the crown of her head, and she kisses the space near his collarbone that just peeks out from under his too many layers of clothes.

Later, she will pretend that this is the first time, in a bed, at a time when she can look him in the eyes, when she’s not cheating on a dead man, or not implicitly emotionally blackmailing him into it. There is a frightening amount of devotion in his eyes, in his every move. She expects she must look the same way to him.

This will end badly, she knows. But maybe they’ll have fun along the way.

 

 


End file.
